Seems like it shouldn't be too hard to write a little function (perl, python, whatever) to act as a "visitor" to hold this state, then just pass it little clos

Seems like it shouldn't be too hard to write a little function (perl, python, whatever) to act as a "visitor" to hold this state, then just pass it little closures (maybe a hash/map?) to evaluate the regexs and pass the match into a code block? Something like (perl): &visit_matches( { ' +' => sub { $x += length( $1); }, '#+' => sub { print $1, ' at ' $y, ',', $x'; $x += length( $1); }, '\n' => sub { $y++; } }); (not an exact match to the pseudo-awk, but enough to get the idea)